On the "empirical method" - of course Mises used historical and present day (present day when he was alive) EXAMPLES. So did all the great economists - going back to the Say family and Bastiat and Ricard Whately and (on and on). However, that is not what a natural scientist means by the "empirical method" - trying to apply this to economics (as if economics were physics) really is a mistake.

For example, when Milton Friedman claimed in his essays on "Positive Economics" (one might say "Posititivist" - as in Logical Positivism that both Ludwig Mises and F.A. Hayek detested) that it did not really matter if a theory made sense (was logical - was rational) if it "predicted" correctly, he was in error (he really was).

One can pile up "empirical evidence" in favour of a theory AND for the opposite of the same theory (on the minimum wage laws - or anything else). This is because the human world is incredibly complicated (with endless factors) there is not going to be a "all other factors being equal" period - no nice lab experiments under controlled conditions (and with stuff that does not think for itself - shock, horror, human beings are not inanimate objects).

What one can do is try and work out if a theory makes sense - if it is logical, or if there is a logical flaw in it. Not just in the reasoning - but in the assumptions the reasoning is based upon.

Then one looks around at history and modern examples - not as a part of a formal "empirical method", but to help explain what one is saying.

By the way - on a university education.

The man who wrote the best starting work in economics published in the United States in the 20th century (Henry Hazlitt - "Economics in One Lesson") never even studied at a university, let alone got a job at one.

Henry Hazlitt had people to support - so he had to get a job (from an early age). He could not afford to do the rich kid thing of going to university for years - crying fake tears about "the people" (whilst privately despising them), because Hazlitt actually was a "man of the people" (i.e. his family did not have lots of money).

This did not mean that Hazlitt did not become a learned man - or that he did not teach himself to communicate what he had learned (by reading and discussion) and the thoughts he had developed himself.

These days things are even worse. It costs about 300,000 Dollars for an Ivy League education (once you have added up everything). "Thanks" partly to government subsidies (which have had the same effect they have had in health care - i.e. led to an explosion of costs).

What ordinary person can afford the inflated cost of such an "education" (without crawling to the very government that inflated the costs, with its subsidies, in the first place).

Nor does the foundation money that many Ivy League universities tend to be given to conservative or libertarian potential students.

In fact such people tend to get sneered at as "Red Necks" (if they are white) and "Uncle Toms" (if they are black).

Conservative and libertarian potential students have (mostly) learned not to apply.

Anyway - if one wants leftist propaganda (which basically all the Ivy League teaches in the humanities and social sciences) one can just turn on a network television broadcast or read one of the "mainstream" newspapers.

I know that in Britain one of the reasons for founding Buckingham university was to get away fron the government financed system (in some ways Buckingham was a success - in some ways it was not).

In the United States some colleges still hold out against government (taxpayer) money. Hillsdale and Grove City College spring to mind.

However, one should not be unfair - after all there were free market people in the government financed universities in Britain (for example Jack Wiseman at the University of York - after his death they got rid of the library he set up "we need more space for administration") and the largest concentration of Austrian School economists in the United States is (I believe) at Auburn (a State university in Alabama), that is also where the Ludwig Von Mises Institute is based (although that is funded voluntarily - mostly by small donations).

I love the Von Mises Institute when they keep to economics. However, when some people associated with the Institute go off into other things I have a problem with them. For example, the anti World War II stuff (where they follow the Rothbard - not the Mises line) and the American Civil War stuff.

There is a failure (by some people) to understand that all bad economic side of Lincoln (who, YES, was a Henry Clay type in economic policy) on taxes, fiat money expansion, and regulations was WORSE with the Confederate government.

Yes it is not "just" slavery - all the economic stuff that certain people attack Lincoln for was worse (wildly worse) with the Confederates.

By the way - the civil liberties record of the Confederates was also WORSE (and for free white people not "just" slaves).

Ludwig Von Mises would never have made the mistake of just looking at one side (Lincoln during the Civil War, America and Britain during World War II, America during Korea or Vietnam) and comparing them to an ideal standard (surprise - they do not measure up as ideal) and then de facto assuming the other side must have been in the right. One has to compare BOTH sides before making a judgement.

This is not the "empirical method" (or some such) it is just common sense.

For example Mises worked with the main Catholic party in Austria during the interwar period - and has got attacked by the left for working with these "clerical Fascists".

Mises did NOT think that they were wonderful (far from it), but the alternatives were the National Socialists (the Nazis) and the Marxists - both of whom were WORSE than Dollfuss, Schuschnigg and so on.

In real life on does not have the option of a "pure" side, one is faced with life or death struggles and one must choose a side that actually exists. Which means choosing between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in the Civil War, between the Allies and the Axis in World War II, between the United States and allies against the Marxists in Korea and Vietnam (and so on...).

Not saying "well neither side are anarchocapitalists so I am just going to throw my toys out of the crib and cry and scream til I am sick...."

None of the above means that one should not be honest about one's own side - including opposing bad stuff that they do (for example Allied bombing of German civilians during World War II), but (in life or death struggles) opting out and saying "a plague on both your houses" is not a real option.

Let us say that neither Mises or Hayek ever got a job anywhere without the support of that (sadly small minority) of big business people who are pro free market. A false claim - but let us humour the left and pretend it is true.

What (if true) would this claim say against Mises and Hayek - NOTHING.

What it would really do is to say a lot against the universities.

Sadly the collectivist anti-liberty bias of academia ("The spell of Plato") has long been with us - perhaps never stronger than today.

A very good post - in a better world such a post would be more common in Economist magazine blogs.

What the Slate article was trying to do (turn the bias in academia against pro freedom ideas, a bias that emerged in Germany with the rise of the Historical School, and in the United States with Richard Ely and his fellow Progressives, into a claim that the scholarship of Mises and Hayek was someone lacking) was vile, and needed to be exposed.

As for the comments - some good, some not.

To call Mises a "nutter" is false, his main difference with Murry Rothbard was not on apriori logic being the basis for economics (on the contrary it was Rothbard who wrote "In defence of extreme apriorism"), it was over Rothbard's anarchism.

Mises had been a soldier (he knew a bit about war - "empirical" well that is not really what I mean, but again it would take a lot of words to explore correctly), so the idea of private protection agencies (or whatever) holding back vast armed forces struck him as rather absurd - and being a blunt man, he said so. Now Mises may have been quite wrong - but his thinking was hardly "nutty".

As for the empirical method in economics.... it is possible to get "empirical evidence" for a theory, but also one can get "empirical evidence" showing the opposite of a theory.

For example, one can collect empirical evidence showing that a rise in the minimum wage increases unemployment, but one can also collect empirical evidence showing it does not increase unemployment (indeed the left were very fond of a study in New Jersey that claimed to show that a rise in the mimimum wage law of that State "caused" a fall in unemployment).

Something is either logical or it is not - for example either it is logical to say that increasing the price of labor (over the market rate) will reduce demand, or it is not logical. The world being what it is (with a zillion and one factors pushing the results of any "study" all sorts of ways) try to treat economics as if it was physics (subject to empirical experiments) is folly.

There is also the starting point of Mises (and of Carl Menger and so on) - i.e. that (unlike physics or ....) economics starts with a reasoning mind (the "I") human beings. Human being (by defintion - as they are "beings") are subjects (not just objects) and not be treated (by theory) as if they were just inanimate objects.

It is not "nutty" to say that human BEINGS (agents - reasoning "I"s) exist. On the contrary, it is nutty to deny it.

Whether one takes the Aristotelian foundation of Carl Menger (from Franz Brantino), or the Kantian (really Ernst Cassirer) approach that Mises sometimes does, or the "Common Sense" approach of the Scottish School of Philosophy (going from Thomas Reid and before to Noah Porter and James McCosh), or the Oxford Realism of Cook Wilson, Sir William David Ross, Harold Prichard (and Antony Flew?). One accepts a few basic things. Two of which are...

The material universe is real - it is not a fantasy of our minds.

The mind is also real - we really do exist and make choices (real choices).

Without both of these things - economics (and much else) is impossible.

Hayek and Mises.

Actually when they differ (which is not very often) it is Mises (not Hayek) who is correct. To justify what I have just written would take a long argument (not suitable for a blog comment).

As for businessmen.

Sadly most big business people are far from Ayn Rand's ideal (the lady knew that - her novels are in the Romanitic tradtion, Rand said so often enough) and are more likely to subsidize interventionists (hopeing to profit from their interventions) than people like Hayek and Mises who were harsh opponents of what is now called "corporate welfare".

In Europe Mises faced not only anti semitism and anti freedom idealogy (both Brown and Red), he also faced the self interest of short sighted business people (who thought in terms of subsidies, and protection from competition, and regulations drafted in their favour and against their foes) rather than the free market.

Often it was the same in the United States and other places - both for Mises and for Hayek.

The problem with libertarianism has nothing to do with Mises and Hayek but with the degenerated vulgar-libertarianism of today and its fanatical followers. These followers are ignorant and unable to follow a complex line of argument. In their fanatical world-view everything is black and white and they derive all their answers from the so called libertarian axiom:

“Individuals have an absolute right to do whatever they want as long they don’t violate the rights of other individuals. Individuals have the right to defend themselves and their property. Individuals have the right to voluntarily enter any contract as long as it doesn’t violate this”.

From this axiom they derive some reasonable conclusions but also a lot of pure crackpottism and they are blind to the absurdity of some of their own positions. For example:

*Individuals have an absolute right to possess and develop any kind of weapon, including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

*The only acceptable tax level is zero; anyone who argues for a higher tax level is proponent of a slave state. There is only a gradual difference between Berry Goldwater and Stalin, as both accept a higher tax rate than zero.

*Individuals have the right to sell themselves as slaves, including the right for the owner to kill the slaves if that is stated in the contract.

*Only a private police force and private prosecutors and are acceptable, and poor people who can’t afford to be paying customers are left unprotected. Hence, murdering poor people will go unpunished.

*Children are viewed as rational agents that enter an implicit contract with the parents. The parents are allowed unlimited power over the children in return for food and shelter. A child is allowed to leave the parents at any age if they believe they can support themselves.

*There are no laws to stop cruelty towards animals. It will be possible to set up a business where paying customers are allowed to abuse and torture animals to death for their own pleasure.

*A social-Darwinist contempt for weakness. Libertarians sometimes praise when the stronger and smarter outcompete the weaker. They don’t just praise the winners but view it as something to be happy about that the losers lose, get their “punishment” and go under.

*Egotism is the paramount moral imperative and the biggest “sin” you can commit is to accidentally be an altruist and help other people without expecting anything in return. To be an altruist is cave in to the slave mentality derived from Christianity.

The last two bullet points are Ayn Rand’s version of libertarianism. Rand’s philosophy is inspired by Social Darwinism and Nietzsche’s cult of the superman (übermench), who views all norms in society as chains that prevent his strong will and genius from self-expression. The heroes in Rand’s political fiction are tall, beautiful and blonde with blue eyes while the enemies are ugly short, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. By the way, Rand has been an inspirational figure for Satanism.

"My understanding is that after Mises fled Nazifying Europe and resettled in America, he was offered a number of academic posts in the interior of the country, but preferred to stay in New York City, where his visiting post at NYU was funded by several businessmen."

This is after it notes:

"Mises left Vienna for Geneva in 1934 to accept an academic appointment at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, which was offered to him by William Reppard, the Institute’s co-founder"

Which conspicuously fails to actually address the question it claims to of who funded his academic appointment. My “light googling” (to borrow Wilkinson’s words) didn’t turn anything up, and, yes, it’s Metcalf’s responsibility to justify the statement now that it’s been challenged, but this isn’t counterevidence yet.

And then turning to Hayek:

"As for Hayek, his post at the London School of Economics, from which he famously debated Keynes and cemented his reputation in the world of “polite discourse”, did not involve corporate sponsorship, as far as I know."

As far as you know? Did it, or didn’t it? Will: You promised me disproof from “light googling.” So far I’m getting nothing.

Again: Metcalf — clear this up for us, buddy.

And this pattern goes on. In his final engagement with Mises and Hayek’s academic appointments, no actual disproof is offered of the claim that Hayek’s position at the School of Social Thought was corporate funded:

"In any case, if the LSE or the University of Chicago’s Committee for Social Thought survived, like art museums and symphony orchestras, by the good graces of wealthy benefactors"

Sounds to me like equivocation if not a straight up granting of Metcalf’s point in this case. Where are “the facts,” Will? Tell me.

An enlightening discussion, but since it is filed under American politics, a more street-level view is also valuable.

It seems that a majority of Americans summarize their core political beliefs as:
1. We ought to be fiscally responsible
2. We ought to mostly leave each other alone except where egregious harm is done
A somewhat smaller subset would also add:
3. The Federal government can solve some problems, but it ought to be the solution of last resort.

Alas, there is no major political party espousing these views. (This is why "independent" is the largest "party".) Baffling indeed. It would seem to be a winning proposition.

Some people decided to hang the label "Libertarian" on these beliefs. It's no more nuanced than that. In so doing, they also invoked the history and the academic battles, unfortunately. As a practical political matter, though, most people don't vote on nuances.

Of course, when a label or a viewpoint starts to attract attention, it attracts publicity seekers and strap-hangers who exaggerate and distort it beyond recognition. This has been the fate of street-level libertarianism (not to mention Tea-Partyism).

A clear understanding (or reductio, for that matter) of Hayek, Friedman, et ali, will do nothing to fix this political problem nor to help elect people who reflect the moderate majority view. Maybe we should re-label the Libertarian Party as "The Independent Party." It would be highly untenable to be a nutter-independent!

The ideas themselves do matter, but it would not be socially astute not to take some cue as to which groups support them. I cannot help but wonder, and would ask those critical of corporations supporting ideas, where they think money would come from, with the State absorbing more and more wealth and imposing more and more burdens of paper work which, unremunerated, consumes growing amounts of time otherwise put to productive use. These State burdens, by the way, impose a huge burden on small business people proportionately (with fewer resources) than they do on large corporations which rightly welcome regulations as a useful handicap on their smaller competition. Personally, I do not look to businesses per se, especially big business, as a block to tyranny. Otherwise, they would have opposed FDR's and Truman's administrations and organized to flatly refuse to comply when their statist schemes introduced income-withholding and Soc.Sec. and all the rest. I would love to know who the "crackpot Texas businessmen" were. Can someone tell me a bit about them? ... I wonder, could Unions become a source of support to academia? Would that not just be a form of money-laundering for the Democrat Party? Already academia is subsumed in the leftist ethos (I speak from experience after recently returning to college as an adult), so if they find a little flower of ideas that support economic liberty blooming in their garden, I would hope they might welcome the variety.

I hope Mr. Swanson will forgive me for retaining my anonymity, but I do not propose to offer a thesis here. I personally agree with his view on WW not "signing" his work, but I would bring to your attention that there is precedent for anonymity in the public forum set by the public discussions on Federalism and anti-Federalism prior to the ratification of the US Constitution. ....As to the funding of posts for academics, I would rather see the money-sourcing be transparent. Could someone please explain why a corporate- or trust-funded chair at a university is an evil? It seems this is taken as a given here. It escapes me. The other option is public money obtained from the State? To what sort of moral character in the recipient would that "speak", I wonder? .... I would finally remark that Mr. Schumann seems to be pointing to this:

That's sorta what happened one Bulls game, and that's definitely the quote ... but no, Michael Jordan didn't step aside to let a rookie get points in a blowout. He passed the ball in the final seconds of a close game to a veteran who dunked for the game-winning basket.

Guess that TPaw figures that being halfway, sorta right on the facts is good enough.

I cannot help but read these comments and think some responders did not take the time to read BOTH articles at length. That action is critical to writing a valid commentary.

That being said, I find it troubling that of all the more fluid arguments Mr. Metcalf posits, this one warranted a response. There are much more serious challenges to libertarian thought in his piece than if "the Vons" had corporate sponsorship or not.